America 2040 - Golden World Part 13

A weak sun had burned through the swiftly moving thunderstorm, and she could position it roughly by catching a glint, now and then, through the dense roof of the jungle. All she wanted at that moment were water and a dry place to sit down. She moved on. The sun was to her right, and she kept it there as she traveled a torturous hundred yards through ever-thickening undergrowth. When she came to a fallen tree, she halted, panting, thirsty. She was losing liquid rapidly through her heavy perspiration.

It was a giant of a jungle tree, a full ten feet across at its fallen base, and it had left a cavity in the jungle floor where its shallow root system had been ripped out. The cavity was half-full of water, which was clearer than the water of the river, the soil being quite sandy under the deep layer of mulch. She didn't even think twice before falling onto her stomach and drinking deeply. The water had the flat, bland taste of rainwater and was, to her, indescribably delicious.

She climbed up onto the trunk of the fallen tree, using the exposed roots as a ladder. The base of the tree, just above the protruding roots, was covered in a soft, gray, mossy growth. The roots made a good backrest as she sat, one leg extended, and protected the injured thigh from contact with the moss by c.o.c.king her right knee. She had wetted her neck scarf and used it to carefully clean away the mud from the cut. The cut was no longer bleeding. She couldn't get all the dark mud out of it, but surprisingly it didn't hurt as she tried to clean it, finger wrapped in the scarf.

She put the scarf under her thigh, let it down slowly, and closed her eyes. She had no idea where she was. Perhaps she was on the planet of the Americans, perhaps not, because she still couldn't remember whether the navigator on theKarl Marx had said that 61 Cygni A was the star to the left or to the right.

She knew only that she was alone, on an alien planet, in the middle of a vast jungle near a wide, brown, slow-moving river.

She thought of the dead-of Captain Fedor Novikov, Ilya Salkov, the boy Ivan, and all the others. And of Yuri.

She found herself laughing bitterly. There was no amus.e.m.e.nt in her laugh. She opened her eyes and stared up into the impenetrable foliage. A brightly colored bird c.o.c.ked a beady eye at her. From the direction of the river there came a gargantuan roar, a roar like nothing she'd ever heard before.

She laughed. This was all there was. She was it. She stood up atop the fallen tree. She could see a few yards of tangled undergrowth, and the soaring trunks of the giant trees, the oppressive green of thecanopy.

"Here I am!" she bellowed, her throat straining with the effort. "Here I am!" She knew she could very well be the only citizen of the Soviet Union alive. She'd seen theKarl Marx die in s.p.a.ce and had seen Ivan die with a piece of jagged metal severing his jugular vein. All the killing in the two mutinies had meant nothing, for they would all have died when the ship destroyed herself.

She drew herself up to her full height, standing at attention. "Here I am, Yuri," she said. "Here I am.

Look at me. This is Russia. This is your brave new world, your extension of glorious communism among the stars. Look at it, Yuri. Here I am."

She sank down, very tired. She leaned back against the roots of the fallen tree and put the scarf back under the wound on her thigh so that she could stretch out her legs. From somewhere not too far away came a hissing bellow of sound, followed by a shrill, eerie scream of agony. She closed her eyes. At that moment she almost wished that one of the things that bellowed and screamed and crashed through the undergrowth would find and kill her.

Her eyes flew open. She jerked her head, looking right and left. A feeling of devastating loneliness caused a catch in her breathing. For all she knew, she could be the only human on the planet, alone as no person had been alone before. She had never been afraid of death, for she'd faced it many times in many forms, but in the steamy, sodden, heavy loneliness of the jungle, she clasped her arms and a moan of sheer terror escaped from her lips before she regained partial control of her emotions.

If she had died in battle in Africa, her comrades would have done their best to recover her body, give her an honorable burial, and say soldierly things about her. That was the kind of death she had always felt shed have, a soldier's death. Now she would die, and there would be no one to know that she had even existed.

"To h.e.l.l with that, Pulaski," she said aloud. She closed her eyes. She would rest, then she would take stock of the situation. She was not totally without resources, for she had herself. She had her low-cut shoes, a pair of ruined hose, her underwear, skirt, and tunic blouse. Add to that the stars of a marshal of the Red Army on her collar and shoulder boards.

"Most probably," she thought, as she started to doze off. "the issue will be decided rather quickly, with infection in the cut on my thigh from the slime of the riverside swamps."

ELEVEN.

Paul Warden had an a.s.signment that was very much to his liking: He became the colony's official guardian against the miners, the great underground slugs. This responsibility gave him a chance to be out in the open air and the freedom to roam the countryside in a fast, lightweight, well-armed, all-terrain crawler, sometimes with the admiral, sometimes alone. He had located all of the miners' traps within five miles of Hamilton and had marked all of them well. It was up to Paul to maintain an underground monitoring system, so he and the admiral had rigged up a remote listening post aboard the crawler so that Warden could keep an ear on the entire system and still be mobile.

He and the admiral had done a pretty good job hooking all the listening posts into the monitoring stationon the crawler, but there was one little glitch in it that they couldn't smooth out, no matter how many times they went over the circuits. It came from a listening probe just east of town and gave out just one little beep at odd intervals. The signal was just enough to kick the needle on the dial and to form an audio signal alarm of about one second's duration. After going over the electronics three times and replacing the listening probe twice, Paul gave up, deciding that the glitch was in the monitor on the crawler.

There were a lot of unanswered questions about the underground things, which Stoner McRae had named miners because they were so skilled at cutting their tunnels. Where did they put the dirt and stone that they excavated from their tunnels? What became of the waste products left from their ingestion of dirt, stone, and whatever else they ate? Both Stoner McRae and Amando Kwait were very interested in finding the answers to those questions- Stoner because he wanted to examine the waste for minerals and Kwait because the waste might make good fertilizer or contain some of the metallic trace elements missing in Omega's topsoil. Warden gathered soil samples from the areas around miner traps and delivered them to the labs at the end of each day.

One of the mysteries of the miners was soon solved: Amando Kwait, touring his planted areas along the Dinah River valley, had borrowed the admiral as an escort that day. When Amando was satisfied that his crops were flourishing, growing so rapidly under Omega's sun that he was astounded, he decided to take advantage of the admiral's company and protection to do some scouting on his own. He had access to all the reports turned in by all teams studying Paul s samples, but sometimes facts, figures, soil a.n.a.lyses, and all the scientific data in the world is not worth one good look. He had the admiral drive up the valley as the river snaked and turned, bearing off gradually to the northeast toward the distant sh.o.r.es of Lake Dinah. There would be enough arable land in the river valley to feed the population of Eden, even if it doubled and redoubled several times.

They were moving at good speed through rolling, gra.s.sy veld. The heat of summer was beginning to turn the gra.s.s more brown. With the crawler moving briskly along, Amando had the feeling he was riding a roller coaster. The vehicle sped up and down the slopes and ridges, and an ant on a peanut-sized crawler driving across a piece of corrugated plastic roofing would, Amando thought, have the same feeling of quick ups and downs. The odd thing about it was that the ridges, or corrugations, stretched east and west as straight as the corrugations in roofing.

"Admiral," Amando said, "I think we'd better stop and take a look."

As he stepped down from the crawler, the first thing that struck him was that the gra.s.s was thicker, taller, and healthier than any gra.s.s he'd seen. He pulled up a few stalks and sniffed at the exposed dirt on the roots.

"If you don't mind, Admiral, would you get the soil sample bags and give me some random samplings?"

"My pleasure, sir," the admiral responded. He was enjoying himself. His chest-mounted memory chambers held all of Amandos data on agriculture, but seeing crops growing and digging one's fingers into the dirt helped to bring the information alive.

When Amando had all the samples he wanted, he asked the admiral to drive east along the top of one of the ridges, back in the direction of the river. They were in a rather large depression, extending for miles to the west toward the ocean, bounded on the north and south by rising, rolling hills.

There were no trees of any size in the area of the parallel ridges and troughs, but after a few miles of driving toward the river, Amando could see the line of trees that grew along the river. He was about to tell the admiral theyd gone far enough when, just ahead, the mounds ended, rounding off into the flat,gra.s.sy floor of the veld. They did not all end evenly, but none was more than fifty yards longer than the others; it was, Amando thought, very curious. He had another a.n.a.logy for the area. It was as if giants had plowed perfectly straight furrows extending far into the western distance, throwing up seed rows for planting.

They drove for almost five miles along the flats past the ends of the ridges. The last ridge was not more than a quarter mile from the rise of higher ground. Not well rounded at the end, it had fresh earth showing. Amando approached the fresh earth cautiously. The admiral had a heavy projectile gun loaded with explosive .60 caliber rounds at the ready. Things that dug on Omega had teeth. It was a miner's tunnel, and the freshly dug earth was distributed evenly and neatly in a mounded slope, building up to an older section, which was covered with lush gra.s.s. The tunnel was being constructed as the miner brought up fresh earth.

The admiral's listening sensors detected nothing, so Amando approached and picked up a handful of the fresh earth. It was fine and dry and obviously contained, from its color, pulverized rock from far below the surface. Samples were taken, the find was reported back to control aboard theSpirit of America , and the word was out by the time the crawler reached the vicinity of Hamilton. Amando and the admiral were met by a crawler carrying Stoner McRae, Amanda Miller, and Grace Monroe. The crawlers came to a stop side by side, and the conversation was mostly in question form: Why would the miners transport their diggings for long distances to dispose of them in neat, straight mounds? Why was there only one sign of digging, when it was known from the early survey, before the miners seemed to move away from the vicinity of Hamilton, that there had been at least dozens, and perhaps more, of the beasts in the area? And how did the miners carry the finely pulverized dirt?

Mandy Miller, all curiosity, switched over to Amando's crawler and went back to the ship with him, where she put on a lab smock and helped Amando with the initial a.n.a.lysis. Amando was concentrating on detecting the important trace elements that were missing in the topsoil and was rewarded quickly.

Mandy began a series of tests to isolate anything exotic, and she found traces of the same powerful acids that came from the miner's stomach.

"Amando," she said, a grin on her delicate, heart-shaped face, "I hate to be indelicate, but I think you've been digging in a miner's personal latrine. " She showed him the results of her testings.

He scratched his head. "But there are ma.s.sive amounts of material out there, just in that one depression in the veld. "

"But only one fresh sign," she remarked. "How long, how many years, decades, centuries, have they been making their deposits there?"

Amando shrugged. "Too bad the acid's in it. It's rich enough in minerals and trace elements to be used as fertilizer."

Mandy said, "It's a minute amount, but any amount of that acid might prove too much for human consumption, a.s.suming that it would be a.s.similated by your food crops."

"I'm afraid it would," he said.

Mandy ran further tests on several other soil samples from the mounds. She frowned, repeated the run through the a.n.a.lyzer three or four times. "I think you've got your fertilizer," she said at last. "The acid is biodegradable. These samples show no acid at all. They must be from mound sections at least fifty years old."

Amando, for his own satisfaction, ran some tests of his own. Any soil sample taken from more than a few feet from the end of a mound was acid free.

"They're big, " Mandy said. "The stomach cavity of those we killed could hold about a half ton of material at one time. But at a half ton a load-my G.o.d, it may have taken generations of miners to build the mounds you saw."

"I will ask Captain Rodrick to a.s.sign a scout to check for more areas such as the one near the river,"

Amando said, grinning widely. He had begun to fear severe shortage of fertilizer, and knowing nutrition as he did, he had envisioned health problems, a kind of starvation in the face of plenty, when the food supplements carried by the ship ran out. Now the problem was solved. That corrugated plain would provide mineral-rich fertilizer for at least a century, and there would almost have to be other dumping grounds such as that one, for it didn't make sense to think that every miner west of the snowy mountains would make the long, underground trip to that little depression.

That one problem solved, the scientists were ready to tackle the next one, which was the continuing glitch in the one listening probe. It took Warden several days to notice that the point from which the sound originated was moving ever so minutely.

"Whoa, there," he said when he realized that the point of origin had moved some twenty feet. He and the admiral drove to the spot east of town where the listening probe was planted. He had charted the tunnels in that area already. But the echoes from Chief Engineer Rosen's sound generator charted out a new tunnel, headed straight toward the nearest house in Hamilton, about five hundred yards away.

"What do you make of it, Admiral?" Warden asked. Like most who came into close a.s.sociation with Grace Monroe's prize robot, he had to remind himself that the tall, handsome man was not of flesh and blood.

"The probe should have picked up the sounds of movement, and especially the sounds of tunneling," the admiral said.

Warden thought so, too. He circled the end of the new tunnel with listening devices and put on a headset to cut out all extraneous sound. At first he heard nothing, and then there was a brief burst of sound, which ceased immediately. That pattern continued for an hour. He got on the communicator to Emi Zuki, sent her a recording of the sounds that came at irregular intervals, and asked her to run a comparison with the sounds on record. It took Emi only five minutes.

"Here's a recording of a miner crawling," she said, and Paul heard the familiar, rhythmic, sc.r.a.pe-sc.r.a.pe sound. Then, from the tapes made by the crawler inside the burrow of the first miner to be killed, there was the sound of deep-down digging.

Study of the dead miners had revealed that the creatures dug tunnels by rotating their heads just over ninety degrees to one side and then back one hundred eighty degrees to a ninety degree-plus position on the opposite side. Toothlike projections of stony skeletal material on the miner's heavy snout formed, indeed, a living drill bit.

"All right, Commander," Emi said. "Listen to this. I'm going to put your glitch, your one burst of sound, on a repeater." Repeated over and over, the sound had the same sc.r.a.pe-sc.r.a.pe characteristics of thedigging sound.

"Son of a gun," Warden said. It appeared that an infinitely patient miner, the first to be detected near Hamilton since the fourth miner was killed near the banks of the Dinah River, was boring a tunnel through the relatively soft subsoil one movement of his digging head at a time.

"Hold on a minute, Emi," Paul said, programming his monitor to go back to the first day the glitch appeared on the scroll. He found it, fed the sound to Emi, and by using the same technique of repeating the one burst of sound, they heard the unmistakable sound of a miner moving through a stone tunnel.

"What we have here, Admiral," Warden said, "is a sneaky one. He came from G.o.d knows how far away, moving one half of his body at a time, waiting for a while, with no regularity of timing, and moving the other half." A bit of work on Emi's computer told them that it had taken the miner over forty-eight hours to crawl a distance of less than two hundredfeet . He had done itso patiently, inching the front part of his body forward, resting, then bringing the stern up, that Warden knew that there was a brain of no mean ability there underground. How had the d.a.m.ned thing figured out that the sounds of its movement were being detected?

He conferred with the two people who were most interested in the miners, Mandy Miller and Grace Monroe. "What I want to know is what the sneaky so-and-so is up to," Paul said. "He's moving in a beeline toward the nearest house."

"Let's not do anything rash," Grace suggested, highly intrigued. Mandy agreed. If the miner accelerated his digging in an obvious attack on the house, there'd be plenty of time, with Mopro's heavy armaments, to prepare for its emergence.

"I'll keep a good eye on this joker," Warden said. Paul, at last, had his chance to camp out. He set up a two-person tent under an umbrella tree near the spot where the miner was working so slowly and so patiently.

"What do you mean, you don't know how to build a campfire?" he asked, when the admiral confessed his lack of outdoor training.

It was fun. He felt as if he had been taken a few years back in time to his Boy-Scout leader days. The suave admiral, always eager to learn something new, helped gather fallen limbs from the umbrella trees, pulled enough dry gra.s.s to incinerate a buffalo, and got the fire going with his first try. The admiral sat cross-legged on the gra.s.s with Warden, proudly looking at the results of his first outdoor lesson.

Warden set his monitor to give a loud alarm if the pace of the digging increased, then crawled into his sleeping bag. The admiral kept the campfire going all night. By morning the underground digger had increased the length of the tunnel by a few inches.

"He's headed up," Warden said, after a study of the night's readings.

On the second evening Max Rosen and Grace Monroe joined Warden and the admiral at the campsite.

Grace had brought synthetic hot dogs and buns made fresh from a local, wild grain, which had been cleared for human consumption. Even Max had to admit that eating them in the open air improved the taste of the hot dogs.

It took three more nights before the miner emerged. On each of those three nights the admiral and Warden had company. Word had spread. Grace was a regular visitor to Warden's camp. She was happy that, now that the fertilizer mounds had been discovered, there would be no more killing of the miners. They were simply too valuable to kill-except in cases of obvious self-defense-and she had a feeling that there wouldn't be any such cases. The miners were showing amazing intelligence.

When Grace and Max arrived that third night, Paul Warden was showing Evangeline Burr,Spirit 's librarian, how to build a campfire. The admiral, who had come to the camp ahead of Grace, was a.s.sisting in the lesson, but it was Paul who was on his knees beside Evangeline.

Max looked up at Grace as she walked up, winked, and returned his gaze to Evangeline's rump.

"Dirty old man," Grace whispered.

"A connoisseur," Max whispered back.

But that reminded Max that more days had gone by and he still hadn't found time to romance Grace in the manner she deserved and, miraculously, wanted. In all the tumult of Lynn Roberts's death, and chasing and killing miners and spending long hours with Grace in the labs trying to figure out what made the dead-white grubs tick, there just hadn't been time.

"You have done a splendid job," Paul Warden told the librarian as the flames began to lick at the dry wood. "I hereby award you the Paul Warden broken twig medal for exceptional skill in campfire building."

He pushed a broken stick into her blouse pocket and grinned.

Evangeline was smiling up into his eyes. They were still kneeling beside the fire, and it was getting pretty hot, but she was wondering what was so very interesting about Paul's half grin. Actually, it was, on first view, sort of dopey.

"I'll keep it always," she vowed. She moved back from the fire and sat on the gra.s.s. Soon there were roasted hot dogs. Max and Grace had moved about twenty feet away so that Grace could lean her back on the bole of an umbrella tree, and the admiral was in the crawler checking the monitors, so it was up to Paul to entertain Evangeline. Not that he minded. She was a rather attractive young woman, maybe a bit closer to his own age than the younger Sage Bryson. Evangeline was much more friendly than Sage, and she knew a little bit about everything, it seemed. She asked him questions about his service career and listened with a flattering attention, her shining eyes on his, which prompted him to search for old tales to make her laugh.

"Did you fill out those marriage papers?" Max asked Grace.

She made a little face. "I'm sorry, Max."

"Don't be. I lost mine."

"Trying to wriggle out of it, are you?"

"We're going to fill them out tomorrow, d.a.m.n it," he said, "and to heck with waiting until things calm down. " "Have you finished eating?" she asked.

"Yes." He tossed aside the half hot dog he was holding.

"I think if we very quietly move around the bole of this rather large tree, we'll be hidden from the others," she said, with a teasing little smile.

"That's what I like about you," Max said, grinning. "Your brains."

Slowly, smothering giggles-and the idea of Max Rosen smothering a giggle would have astounded everyone who knew him-they eased around the tree. Max checked rather guiltily to be sure that they could not be seen and, with a sigh of pure antic.i.p.ation leaned to put his arms around her.

"We've got to fill out those papers tomorrow," he whispered, as her lips parted, met his, and he felt his toes begin to curl. "Just got to," he said, breaking the kiss to make more firm contact. He was just letting out a gusty sigh from the wonderful taste of her when something rubbed against his leg, and he quickly put down a hand without breaking the kiss to feel bristly hair and body heat.

Max yelped in alarm and rolled, taking Grace with him. They were, after all, sitting on the gra.s.s in miner country, with one of the monsters carefully digging away not too far from the campsite. His first thought was to put his body between the d.a.m.ned thing and Grace so that he ended up on top of her and she was saying, "What? What?"

He leaped to his feet, going for his weapon. Cat walked toward them, its tail sticking straight up. And behind Cat, on the dead run, came the admiral with his .60 caliber gun in hand. "Grace," Max wailed.

"Oh, Max," Grace said, trying desperately not to laugh. She was unsuccessful. Cat came to Max and rubbed against his leg. He rolled his eyes and looked toward the fiery heavens. Evangeline and Paul came to see what was going on.

"We're selling tickets," Max announced disgustedly.

"Oh, poor Max," Grace choked out through her laughter.

"Next time I fall in love," Max said, "it's gonna be with a woman who doesn't have any kids."

The spell broken, the hour growing late. Max took Grace and Cat back to the ship, where they were both still living. They'd move into a very nice house, which was almost complete now, when they were married. For a moment, as he sneaked a quick kiss good night, Max was tempted to enter her quarters, weld the door closed against her menagerie, and tell her he wasn't leaving. But they'd discussed premarital affairs, and Grace had been rather surprised to find that Max was a romantic. Besides, they were going to fill out the marriage papers tomorrow.

Evangeline Burr, finding that she was oddly comfortable with Paul Warden, a state unusual for her in the presence of a man when he was not on library business, stayed at the campsite to help the admiral and him watch the fire. Paul himself asked her to stay, telling her that fire watching was an art as well as a duty, and that it took some practice to become proficient at it.

Omega's seventy-minute hours made for a long evening. When Evangeline said that she'd best be getting back and Paul asked the admiral to escort her, he watched her disappear into the darkness with a smile on his face. She was one nice lady, he thought. And, with a little pang of sadness, he wished that Sagecould be as warm and friendly with him.

He put more wood on the fire, roasted just one more hot dog for a nightcap, and leaned back against his bedroll to eat it. Eden was, he decided, his kind of country. The nighttime temperature was a balmy caress. The skies were spectacular. The smaller of the two moons hung at first quarter just over the horizon. There were no stinging insects, although colorful, mothlike things flitted across the flickering light of the fire now and then. He was imagining that Sage was sitting by his side, her hand in his, when the communicator paged him. It was the admiral.

"Commander Warden," the admiral said, "I'd like your permission to delay my return to our campfire.

The entertainment robot has malfunctioned and is speeding along the corridors, telling the same joke over and over at the top of his amplification. Rather than wake Grace, I'm going to help the RD seventy-seven repair robot with the circuit adjustment. It shouldn't take more than two hours."

"Take your time, Admiral, " Warden told him.